Laminate flooring recommendations please! I do not know which ones are good?!

We are in the latter stages of a house renovation and need to have new flooring in the whole house. For our new kitchen/family room, utility room and hallway I'm intending to have laminate as I not think we can afford wooden flooring and we also have a toddler and baby, so this seems a more practical choice.

So what recommendations do you have for laminate? We have 2 options on install either pay our builder (quote £1k) to install and buy online directly (but which one?) or go with the local carpet shop who have quoted £500 to install 'quick step' and the flooring is £1.7k including underlay.

We got IKEA laminate - the one that looks more like wood (has knots etc) - and I personally think it looks great. The key is to get it professionally installed, with good underlay. Don't forget proper edging / the bits that cover joins into other rooms too. I went to view a house a few weeks ago that had the same flooring except theirs looked totally awful - they'd clearly installed it themselves because you could see all the joins, and they hadn't used edging so it looked wonky. Looked so dreadful.

Second Quickstep. We have Lagune in the bathroom and its a very good quality product. Expensive though - ours was £30/sqm. Perspective is nice too - I nearly chose this for our kitchen/hallway but decided on engineered oak in the end.

To echo above, make sure you get a good underlay. Our builder recommended getting laminate that is at least 8 mm thick. It's tougher to scratch or chip. We just got our floors done. We went to a few places like b&q to see what we liked. Put a few pieces out on the floor to see what you like. We then found the same stuff online and saved about £10/pack. If you're in the brighton area, pm me and I'll give you the number for our flooring guy. He did a really nice job.

Thanks for your thoughts... We're going to the local flooring company this week so we can checkout their range of quick step then. I'm very conscious fact that a good fitter will be key to making it look good!

A friend said she had her whole house floored in solid oak from Selco at approx £20 prob not including VAT though, per sq metre. Much much cheaper than most wooden flooring,so worth checking. It looked nice, quite knotty but would last ages.

My mum, a cheapy do-er upper if ever there was one, has had loads of laminate, and she says the problem is that any damp and the laminate starts to dissolve... from underneath..She has gone off it,and certainly in her house it has not lasted well, and definitely looks and feels a bit tacky

I have bamboo through my kitchen diner, hall utility office and cloakroomits 5 years old and I love itits environmentally soundnot too expensiveand if the scratches and dents get really bad I could always have the whole lot sanded back as its 13mm thick solidbut the nature of the pattern is that even the horrific scratches are almost invisible